Everything he sold was protected by licensing agreements since pretty much forever, and those agreements stemmed far from, specifically, football players. No other student of any college is allowed to auction off anything that has their school's trademarked logo for a profit, just like a Google employee can't start slapping Google on merchandise and retailing it.

My high school was the Central Catholic Fighting Irish, and 20 years ago we were invloved in a lawsuit with Notre Dame because our angry Irishman was too similar to theirs so now Central Catholic's emblem-dude is standing with one foot facing backwards. Football is small fraction of all things college, and likewise played a miniscule part in how this is handles.

Not to mention this shit's protected by the constitution and international trade agreements and everybody who trademarks anything worldwide (minus China, of course) is protected by these laws.

It's not the highest correlation, as stated in the post. Furthermore...

1) Me thinks every player is filmed on every play. I don't think high school QB's receive the same individual camera attention afforded to elite NFL QB's (see; Brady, Tom (not to say that even TB has a camera situated only on him every snap (He doesn't.))).

2) QB "generated" stats are subject to more externalities than any other position, exposing them to the (dis)advantage of dramatic skewing (a poor vs. exceptional OL; having an elite receiver; particular coaching scheme, although every position is subject to this to a degree). Perhaps "QB logged stats" would be more accurate.

3) There are some stats available, though not many, but 2) indicates that individual stats may be (often are) a poor indicator of success. Fact of the matter, there are a bunch of guys with a bunch of specific knowledge who are paid a bunch of money to spend a bunch of time looking at a bunch of film and who have, thankfully, made it unnecessary for you to place your finger anywhere near reason.